The now common commingling of rock, jazz, and classical streams in American composition was pioneered by Frank Zappa (1940-1993). A virtuoso guitarist, an indefatigable bandleader, a tenacious businessman, and a maddening iconoclast, his prolific output ranges from hit pop singles (“Valley Girl”) to orchestral works of formidable modernist complexity (“Bob in Dacron”), with trippy jazz-rock instrumentals (“Peaches En Regalia”) and much else in between. A Los Angeles icon, his work is also well appreciated in Europe; his ghost doesn’t quite haunt New York, though, which makes a pair of Zappa-themed concerts at Brooklyn’s Roulette (Jan. 25-26), offered by the fantastic young musicians of Switzerland’s Lucerne Festival Alumni, seem all the more necessary.

Zappa’s lack of posthumous presence here may be regrettable, but the composer’s music and personality contain problematic elements that could give anyone pause. While Zappa’s protean catalogue can be idealized as an awesome, unitary composition, individual works, for all their raucous energy, can pale in comparison to those of the modernist icons he revered. His music lacks Varèse’s pitiless severity, Boulez’s fine-grained intellectualism, Stravinsky’s happy embrace of aesthetic discipline—or, on purely American terms, the joyful, uncompromising originality of a fellow Southern Californian, Harry Partch. (“For Your Eyes Only,” a piece by John Zorn that’s included in the concerts, reveals a composer with a more refined ear for instrumental color, a keener grasp of harmony, and a more convincing sense of narrative.) And, while one can admire Zappa as a vibrant satirist of American life and as a tribune in the fight against censorship, such deliberate provocations as the singles “Bobby Brown Goes Down” (with its cascade of homophobic lyrics) and “Jewish Princess” would not advisably be released today.

But at the Lucerne concerts, featuring the conductor Matthias Pintscher and the vocalist Della Miles, all is forgiven. The selected works—including “Dupree’s Paradise” and “G-Spot Tornado,” which gleefully mash up pop and modernist elements—represent the classical Zappa at his best. And the most recent pieces, by the gifted Olga Neuwirth (“Eleanor,” which uses texts by Martin Luther King, Jr., and June Jordan) and Tyshawn Sorey (“Sentimental Shards,” a nod to both John Adams and Duke Ellington) give a contemporary political focus to Zappa’s anti-establishment rage. ♦